NAS Units as VM Hosts: QNAP's Virtualization Station Explored
by Ganesh T S on August 18, 2014 10:15 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Storage
- Virtualization
- QNAP
Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
Important NAS aspects such as RAID rebuild durations and power consumption have already been recorded in our performance review. The power consumption numbers for typical NAS usage with Virtualization Station active are provided below. Note that the four drives being used are the Western Digital WD40EFRX 4 TB Red drives.
| QNAP TS-451 Power Consumption (Virtualization Station Active) | |
| Activity | Avg. Power (W) |
| VM Workload (Heavy Internet Browsing) | 29.84 W |
| VM Workload (Heavy Internet Browsing) + robocopy Write to RAID-5 Volume | 33.14 W |
| VM Powered On (Idle) / Disks Active | 28.19 W |
| VM Powered Off / Disks Idle (not spun down) | 25.23 W |
The combination of low power Red drives as well as the power efficiency of the 22nm Bay Trail-D Celeron J1800 results in an energy-efficient NAS and hypervisor platform. One would be hard-pressed to create a fully-populated NAS with four bays along with the ability to run VMs within such a power profile.
Coming to the business end of the review, we believe that Virtualization Station is undoubtedly one of the most interesting features to emerge in the COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) NAS operating systems space. The benefits to SMBs / SMEs are without question. From a home consumer perspective, it might even be the start of virtualization going mainstream. Let us be honest here - the average user (not the typical AnandTech reader) cares little about virtualization as a feature. However, with the TS-x51 series, it might turn out to be something worth it for such users to explore. The ability to run Android VMs in Virtualization Station is coming soon. Combined with the applications that we outlined earlier in this piece, it is definitely going to be interesting to see how the market reception for QNAP's TS-x51 units.
The Virtualization Station package in QTS is definitely usable, but it is a bit light on features compared to offerings such as Hyper-V. We would like to see high speed data transfer between the host and the guest implemented at the earliest. In addition, QNAP could also prepare applications for P2V (physical-to-virtual) translation - enabling its customers to retire old PCs with the data backed up. Usage of a WLAN adapter as the dedicated network adapter for the VMs could enable users to retain performance while also taking advantage of the unique feature. All in all, despite the missing features, QNAP's Virtualization Station is a well-rounded compelling offering that helps them stand out in the COTS NAS market for SMB, SOHO and home consumers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
38 Comments
View All Comments
Marthisdil - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
Except be cheap - when you could build a "server" out of a desktop PC that can do a lot of the same stuff, for less money.deeceefar2 - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
I could, and have done that in the past. But for MUCH more time invested and with many more support head aches. I use at least 1/2 of all of the features of this box, and I challenge you to build a system that does that for significantly less money using similar power draw without spending months configuring and maintaining it.isa - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
A thoughtful article overall, so thank you Ganesh. I especially focused on the "power user application scenarios". I get #3 and #1, but #2 baffles me. Why must I run ubiquity's apps in a VM? Since that app comes in apple/win/linux flavors, can't one just download the appropriate version for one's NAS and run it without a VM? Why is a VM required to run Ubiquity or any other home automation app if it's offered in a version compatible with my NAS's OS?ganeshts - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
Does the NAS vendor provide support for unofficial packages? Most vendors I have talked to wash their hands off all warranties / support once you start messing around in SSH. To be frank, for the average user, it is quite easy to mess up the NAS installation (particularly when the extraneous package they want to install comes with a big train of dependencies).isa - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
Good points, and I agree.Oyster - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
Ganesh, awesome work. Thanks for listening to the feedback and covering these details. Very well done article.For your next, can you please cover a showdown between Synology and QNAP OSes (including features like apps, VPN, etc.)?
Arnok666 - Saturday, October 17, 2015 - link
+1shodanshok - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
Hi Ganesh, thank you for the good review.However, I strongly disagree on the chosen Raid level: if you want to run a virtual machine at full speed, you should really use Raid10 rather then Raid5. The problem with Raid5 is that typical 4KB random writes will trigger full stripe read/modify/write, which will lead noticeable slower VM performance.
I personally faced off this very problem some time ago, with a custom Linux mdraid build running some (5+) VMs: switching to Raid10 drastically boosted performance.
Regards.
ganeshts - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
Thanks for the note. Most consumers buying the TS-451 are looking for optimal balance of performance and capacity. With 4x 4 TB drives, RAID-5 gives 12 TB of effective storage, while RAID-10 gives 8 TB. I agree that in performance sensitive use-cases, the appropriate RAID level must be chosen.Another reason for choosing RAID-5 is that it typically has the worst performance (along with RAID-6) making it a good test of stressing the I/O and other platform capabilities of different NAS models. All our NAS reviews use RAID-5 for comparative benchmarking even though it might not be a suitable RAID level for a particular application.
tuxRoller - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link
So, xen but not kvm? You're doing your reader a disservice by ignoring the third most popular virt platform.